Donald Samson

As a composition student a long time ago, my climactic assignment was to tell the story of Orwell "Shooting an Elephant" in the style Lawrence used in Twilight in Italy and in the style Hemingway used in In Our Time. A little over a year later, I left college and worked as a technical writer for a manufacturer of outdoor lighting equipment and traffic signals. I described how various parts were cast, machined, and assembled into finished products. To determine a product's cost, I described very specifically on an operation sheet the raw materials or components in the product and the steps necessary to create it. I had to be concise, because each letter or number I wrote had to be hand keypunched for loading into a computer. Imitating the styles of Lawrence and Hemingway, and my other composition assignments, had done little to prepare me for writing outside academe. Over the last thirty-five years, some say, the situation hasn't improved much.

The gulf between academic and nonacademic writing has widened. Heather MacDonald says that current writing instruction is "not just an irrelevance, it is positively detrimental to a student's development . . . an indigestible stew of 1960s liberationist zeal, 1970s deconstructivist nihilism, and 1980s multicultural proselytizing" (3). In a widely circulated article that appeared in U. S. News and World Report, "The Answer Is 45 Cents," John Leo surveys reports of graduates' writing skills, citing an article in English Leadership Quarterly "urging teachers to encourage intentional errors in English as 'the only way to end its oppression of linguistic minorities and learning writers'" (14). Leo quotes James Sledd's opinion in College English that Standard English is "'essentially an instrument of domination'" (14). For Sledd, the villain is the "military-industrial-educational complex," which aims "to maintain and extend corporate control of schooling and-more generally-corporate control of the accumulation, storage, and dissemination of knowledge" (168).

Writing program staff have moved beyond confrontational attacks on "the executives of the transnational corporations and their flunkies" ( Sledd173) to see the importance of gaining support from business and determining how to prepare students for the writing they will do in their work as college graduates. Programs That Work describes several such programs, including that at the University of Chicago, where faculty recognize that their graduates will not only write in their work but will go on to become "the managers who will have to pass on the writing of those they supervise" ( Williams and Colomb87).

Clearly, most of our students will work outside academia after they graduate, and our function as writing instructors should be in part to prepare them to succeed in the writing they will have to do-and have them as allies of our programs because we helped them prepare to succeed.

Not only in Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs has increasing attention been paid to preparing students for writing in their work. The rapid growth of undergraduate and graduate programs in technical writing attests to increased attention to preparing students for nonacademic writing. However, despite more opportunities for students to prepare for writing in their work, many students receive no formal instruction in writing after first-year composition. Many, if not most, college and university students will not take a writing course after composition. All the writing instruction they will get to prepare themselves for writing in their careers is what they get in composition. If we want to empower our students for success, we should teach them how to write for nonacademic audiences.